What are Some Ideas & Tips on Building Muscle for Women in Their 50s?

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Do want to make sure that you're working out, that you've got good quality exercise over quantity and that you're giving yourself adequate rest and recovery.

Here's jj, Virgin Triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

Hey, welcome to Friday Q and A. I actually like to say Q and A Friday. And if you've got questions, I've got answers. If I don't have the answers, I got plenty of smart friends around me too who do. So leave your questions for me on any of my social media sites or at my podcast on itunes. You can leave a review and leave a question and we will jump in here and I'll answer them. So this one comes from actually just says thank you. I don't have her name, but it says would you please consider doing a live on bodybuilding for women in their 50s. Helpful hint tips, do's and don'ts and inspiration. All right, here we go. And by the way, you can grab anything I talk about if I talk about resources or anything else. Jjvirgin.com forward/questions is where we put all of the stuff that I talk about when I talk about resources for Q and A Friday. So here's a couple different things. And there's first of all, in terms of bodybuilding, the first thing you always have to look at is which type of body do you have. I happen to be a very mesomorphic body. So there's ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs. Ectomorphs are just those naturally thin, wiry people. They seem to make the supermodels. Endomorphs tend to be a little bit more fluffy, curvy. Although now those are the new supermodels. And then mesomorphs tend to build muscle easily. I've always been one of those mesomorphs and actually when I met my birth mom, same thing, so very genetic. I can build muscle easily. In fact, I'm kind of careful at the gym to keep it, keep it down. Otherwise I can really put Some muscle on, I can lift a lot of weight. So that's the first thing that I want you to think about. Now, of course, if you're 50 plus and a female looking to do this, you at any age you have to consider your hormones, but especially at 50 plus, because if you do not have what you need in terms of testosterone and estrogen on board, you'll have issues there. So that's the first thing. And one of the ways to really make sure that you're keeping your hormones up as you age is to make sure that your thyroid and your adrenals are really still kicking. And if you're not, if your thyroid function isn't working well, you will not be able to build muscle. So that's clear. We gotta have good thyroid support. And you wanna make sure that you are taking care of your adrenals, especially as you start to get into any kind of hormonal shift, whether you're a man or a woman, because men go through it too. You wanna make sure that your adrenals are working well. That means that you'll be able to delay and minimize the impact of that of that shift now for women. So back over to adrenals. We also wanna make sure that your workout's not more adrenal problems. So long slow distance exercise like jogging at about 70% of your heart rate for an hour plus, that's going to hurt your adrenals. Doing over exercising without adequate rest and recovery, that's going to tax your adrenals. And so you do want to make sure that you're working out, that you've got good quality exercise over quantity and that you're giving yourself adequate rest and recovery. We'll get back to that. But in general in life that your adrenals are taken care of, that you're doing what you need to support them, which is good sleep. Managing your stress is different for everybody. I just did a podcast, a repeat guest, Nick Ortner of the tapping solution. And tapping can lower cortisol by as much as 37%. So this is a great one. Plus there's some great adrenal support products. I'll do a link in@jjvirgin.com Questions for getting 20% off the Adrenal products I like, which would be designed for health, either their adrenotome or their adrenal complex. Vitamin C is another critical one here too as well Ashwagandha licorice. So a lot of things that can help support your adrenals. So first up, good adrenal and Thyroid second up, because that will reflect on your hormones. If your hormones are starting to drop, you're going into menopause. First of all, I did a great podcast with Dr. Lisa Moscone on phytoestrogens and foods. So these are things like sesame, flax, chocolate, garbanzos. So making sure you're getting a lot of phytoestrogens in your food. Also if your testosterone is starting to drop, looking at maybe supplementing with some dhea. And then the other supplement that I love there is something called GG and that is from Designs for Health. I'll link to that in the show notes. So second thing, besides having good adrenal and thyroid function and making sure that you're managing that stress response is make sure that you've got the hormones on board that you need to help you build muscle. Testosterone, thyroid being super key there. Next up is making sure that you're giving yourself good rest and repair. More is not better and it's really a bell shaped curve of getting enough intensity. Remember your body is going to respond to a workout, to a workout where you're stressing your muscles by by repair. So you need to give yourself, you want to give enough stress that micro damage to the muscles and then you need to give yourself rest and repair. If you're not sleeping well, shout out to sleep candy. I take three every night. You probably will only need two. But I'm one of those people that always needs a little bit more than the average person. So super important to make sure that you're giving yourself good sleep but that you're also doing more restorative stuff in place. So what I do for my workout, I first thing I do is just make sure I'm moving more. My office is up the stairs in my house, that helps. And I have a little dog who likes to get walked. That helps. So that's moving more. And I track all that on my aura ring right along with my sleep. Second thing is to make sure that you're doing some high intensity interval training. So a couple days a week I do interval training and that can be anywhere. New research is showing anywhere from 10 seconds to 60 seconds all out and then recover actively recover for twice as long. So this morning I did that as a little circuit around on my exciser. I'll put a link to the exciser in the show notes. Step bench and my my Stairmaster. So I'll go all out for 20 to 30 seconds. Then I'll recover moving around twice as long. Do it again to accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursting. So depending on your recovery rates, that and your warmup and cool down, that's gonna take you somewhere in the 15 to 30 minute range. Okay. Then you're gonna want to make sure that you're doing that resistance training and you want to hit for hypertrophy, for muscle building. It's really eight to 12 repetitions, multiple three to five sets. And I will mix things up and do things like super sets and change my reps and do a lot of shifting of things and do body weight exercise, etc. But that's the general for, for muscle building. So you do 8 to 12 repetitions. The heaviest weight you can handle good form. If it's not too heavy, take it up 10%. If it's too light, take it down. If it's, if it's too heavy, take it down 10%. And three to five sets, 60 second or so rest break in between. Not so long that the muscle fibers totally recover because you only recruit the fibers that are working. So that's why you do multiple sets to continue to fatigue more and more of the fibers. So you get to more and more of them because you only are going to work and hypertrophy those that you actually fatigue. And you're not going to pull all of those, you know, fibers in an exercise. And of course, obviously do this in good form. Don't hit a body part two days in a row. Don't work a body part if it's still really sore and especially sore at the joint site. Give yourself time to repair. And this is where I have been finally. I'm so proud of myself, I must say. I have been doing both pilates and yoga and more of the restorative vinyasa flow yoga to really help me move through some of this. And I also get massages. And you can also use a foam roller, one of those massage thumpers. I gave a lot of those out for holiday gifts this year. So there's a lot you can do there to help with recovery. And I take an Epsom salts bath every single night when I'm home. When I travel, I try to get that shipped to wherever I'm at. If I'm going to be there for a couple days, get some magnesium salts. The other thing that I do for, for recovery is I do a shake. I use my Paleo inspired shake with branched chain amino acids after a workout. And you can also throw in a little extra collagen. And really the most important thing is just having that on board, having the good high quality prote, having collagen, having that all on board so that your body can use it for repair. Remember, you're doing micro tearing and then you're repairing. So. Ooh, that sounded great. I didn't even mean to do that. So you wanna make sure that you're giving yourself adequate protein repair. And along those lines, remember, if you're over the age of 30, 35, you're under any kind of stress, which is everybody, you probably are not. You don't have the digestive enzymes, the hydrochloric acid in your stomach that you need. So I always take, unless I'm doing my shake because that's much more bioavailable protein, easier to digest. But when I'm out to dinner, when I'm. When I'm eating any other type of animal protein, I always use my safety net plus, which helps break down protein. Also helps me if there's any gluten, dairy, soy lurking or eggs lurking. I'm fine with eggs now, but I still do not do well with gluten or dairy or soy and I avoid them. So highly recommend that you're taking digestive enzymes as well to make sure that the protein you're, you are eating is being broken down and you can use it. Okay, there you go. Hope that served you. If you would like to ask a question, I will get the answer for it. So all you need to do is go to either one of my social media sites, jj, Virgin on Instagram, jj, Virginia official on Facebook, or of course, over to the podcast at. Subscribe to jj. Leave a review, leave a question, we'll get it answered. Alrighty, see you next time.

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